Before watering, stick your finger into the ground around plants in questions. If it's already damp, more water isn't needed. If it's dry, than a soaking that dampens the soil all around the roots and to just below them is in order.

For plants that are wilting in dry soil, the best time to water was yesterday. In other words, it's best not to let plants have to beg for water.

Keep in mind that some plants wilt from heat even when soil moisture is fine. Hydrangeas are notorious for wilting on hot, sunny summer afternoons. You can tell if it's heat and not lack of water by how the leaves look first thing in the morning; they'll have recovered by then if the moisture is good but still wilted in the morning if the soil is dry.

If plants in dry soil are advancing from wilting to a yellowish-green leaf color and/or to browning around the leaf tips and edges, that's a plant's way of telling you, "Hey, I need water RIGHT NOW, and if I don't get it soon, we're both going to be sorry!"

The step beyond that is shedding leaves. That's a last-ditch effort for the plant to get rid of the main way it's losing precious moisture. Without leaves, more soil moisture is conserved for the roots.

Trees, shrubs and perennial flowers that defoliate in summer aren't necessarily dead, so don't dig or yank them right away. When rain and cooler weather return, new foliage may grow - including as late as next season.

Needled evergreens are iffier. They'll occasionally surprise by pushing new needles after dropping the old ones in a heat wave. But when they completely brown, they're usually dead.

Just to be sure, though, wait until next spring to see if new growth occurs.

When watering anything, the two best times are early morning and early evening. Ideally, water directly into the ground and not over top of your plants (grass excepted).

Your plants can use a little help from you in staying fresh during a hot, humid August.

First on the list is policing for weeds, which often creep into the landscape if you've sneaked away for a vacation. Those rains the past two weeks did a great job of sprouting lots of new summer weeds.

Be sure to yank or spray any weeds that are about to go to seed. You'll save yourself tons of future trouble by not letting weeds procreate. A single flower of some weeds can produce hundreds of seeds.

Another high-impact job is "deadheading" the flowers and shrubs. This means removing spent flowers.

Deadheading encourages additional new flowers, controls the spread of flowers that you don't want to drop mature seed, and most of all, neatens the garden.

Some plants quickly drop brown petals, and others hide spent blooms by producing new ones. But for ones that hang onto the brown and hold them high above the foliage, snipping them off instantly improves the bed's appearance.

Some perennial flowers look bad in August from disease, such as daylilies that have browned from fungal leaf streak and phlox and beebalm ravaged by powdery mildew.

If the foliage of perennials is brown along with the flowers, go ahead and cut it - including almost to the ground if it's that bad. Brown leaves aren't doing the plant any good anyway, and removing diseased, fallen leaves is a way to limit future disease outbreaks by taking away disease spores on the cut foliage.

One simple approach is to insert a stake behind the plant and tie green jute or similar soft ties around the plant's midsection.

Even better is to insert three or more green bamboo stakes around a flopping plant cluster and wrap ties around the stakes - creating a kind of plant straitjacket.

You can also buy all kinds of metal plant supports that corral floppers.

In all of these cases, it's far better (and easier) to get flop protection in place early in the season so the plants grow up through them. It's harder and messier trying to bring plants back to good behavior than preventing it.

For early- to mid-season bloomers that flop after bloom, another option is cutting the foliage - including as far back as a few inches.

Catmint, hardy geraniums, gaillardia, lavender, salvia, and centaurea are examples of perennials that can be trimmed back heavily right after flowering. They'll push out fresh new growth, look better the rest of the season, and sometimes even put out new blooms.

Another problem that happens when really wet weather follows dry weather (the scenario in the last half of July) is blossom end rot.

This is a condition in which the bottom of the ripening fruits blackens and rots, working its way up the fruit.

For small sections of end rot, just cut it off. The rest of the fruit is fine to eat.

But when rot has affected the bottom third or more of a fruit, you'll probably have to toss it.

Calcium sprays sometimes slow blossom end rot, but the better solution is to keep the tomatoes consistently damp, avoiding the dry/wet cycle that usually triggers it.

Lack of calcium in the soil is an occasional contributing factor.

A third tomato problem this month is the disease duo of early blight and septoria leaf spot - both of which take off in warm and rainy conditions. Both are becoming increasingly common.

These are fungal leaf diseases that start off with brown splotches and brownish-black spots on the lower leaves. The diseases work their way up the plants and eventually kill them, short-circuiting the ripening of fruits and ending the tomato harvest prematurely.

Spraying is the main way to stop blight and leaf spot - most often with chlorothalonil fungicide for chemical gardeners and copper for organic ones.

You might also try picking off diseased lower leaves to slow the spread, pruning the plants to improve air flow, and mulching the ground to prevent overwintered disease spores from splashing up on the lower leaves in the first place.